21 CD-R's. ...21 CD-R's is the amount you need to waste in order to figure out something seriously isn't working right. Over the last few I've been trying to install both Red Hat 9, and Fedora core 3... test 1, 2, AND test 3. Both distros have the same damn problem... I first tried Fedora Core 3 test 1... that was completely messed from the get-go... anaconda would not start at all. Next it was Fedora Core 3, test 3. This is where the amazing disc 2 screw up first took form... I get halfway through the initial configuration.. setting root password, etc... then I get to the package selection. Everthing installs pretty well... up until I have to switch to disc two. It starts installing for a few minutes, get's a couple of packages in... then it tries installing openoffice.org. The installer dies, it locks up (but I can still move the mouse) and gives me an error saying "Package openoffice.org could not be installed".. blah blah.. "cd may be corrupt" etc etc. Ok, I figure its a fluke... I reboot go through the install process again and I get the same error for the same package. I know you're probably thinking now "well maybe the iso is corrupt!", trust me... it wasn't... before I burned any of the isos I did an md5sum calculation... they matched those which were posted at the ftp mirror I got the .iso's from. AFTER the discs were burned... I even did an md5sum calculation... just to be sure. I do this for all .iso's I burn because sometimes cd writing applications don't give you 'accurate' information.
Well anyway, the install died, so I download Fedora Core 3, Test 2... the SAME error happens... but I get a little bit wiser, the second time I try to install I deselect openoffice.org and all other dependant libraries... the son of a witch STILL gives me an error of the same type... but for a different package. Again; I ran md5sums before and after the burning. Ok at this point I could shoot someone in the damn genitals to express the amount of rage I feel. I download RH9... well guess what!?! SAME THING... it's not even the same DISTRO! (Of course they are in the same family, otherwise I wouldn't post this in this forum category) I deselect openoffice.org and it still doesn't work, another package gets an error... I deselect everything but gnome, X11, some other minor things which I didn't assume were on disc 2... and I still got an error. I'm freaking fed up... I really want to get a Fedora, OR red hat linux box running. If anyone has heard of this before, or just wants to comment please, please, for the love of bob, please do.

Random thought - do you have sufficient disk space to install the distro? It appears you are doing the right things (ie, MD5SUM) and if the process launches correctly and seems to be behaving itself in general prior to the crash, I'm just guessing but it may be that you're running out of disk space. Can you give some details about your rig, and also describe your partitioning scheme. Good luck with it -- J.W.

Perhaps you might want to take a look at another distro as well. Redhat officially stopped supporting Redhat 9 earlier this year.

FC3 is in a series of test releases and is not for general consumption. Why not drop back to FC2 for now and wait until FC3 is ready for release and less buggy?

[QUOTE]Random thought - do you have sufficient disk space to install the distro? It appears you are doing the right things (ie, MD5SUM) and if the process launches correctly and seems to be behaving itself in general prior to the crash, I'm just guessing but it may be that you're running out of disk space. Can you give some details about your rig, and also describe your partitioning scheme. Good luck with it -- J.W.

Perhaps you might want to take a look at another distro as well. Redhat officially stopped supporting Redhat 9 earlier this year.Trust me, I'm NOT running out of space... I have one 40gb hd for my windows xp installation, and an 80gb partitioned as follows: 25 gb for extra ntfs storage (for the win installation), 25 gb as a mount point for root, and a 2 gb swap, and two other ntfs partitions.

I've got an amd athlon xp 2200+, 512 mb ram, I've got some S3 onboard graphics chip, 32 MB dedicated video ram. I've installed many other distro's up until this little snag... including SUSE 9, mandrake 10, debian 3 (I think.. not sure if that was the version I installed).

I know rhl9 is being put to rest, but what I wanted to do there was first install it, then try to upgrade it to a Fedora system.

You know what? Forget it... I'm just gonna install whitebox linux, it sounds appealing; hopefully it is.

Hi,
Is it possible to burn a small ISO to a CDROM and still use the rest of the space to add more files etc. ?

Well technically yes, technically no... an iso is an "image" of a disc... but if you don't fixate the burn then you still should be able to write to the disc, (not sure about CD-R, but I'm positive CD-RW can have "multisession" burns) but then again I'm pretty sure you would first have to 'recompile' the iso with the added files before you burn it

You certainly can burn extra data to a CD with an "open" session and thus make the disc a "multisession" disc, however accessing anything other than the 1st session can be a headache. As for whether this would work with an ISO file... not sure. Certainly under K3B when you select an ISO image to burn, you are given the option to "create a multisession CD", so I would guess it works. How successfully, I am unsure.

Give it a try!

I have had simular maddening attempts to install Fedora and before that RedHat.... the iso's suck big time --- and the damn thing tries to blame your media, media that works for everything else. I think they do it on purpose somehow ... we are not the only ones that can't get a decent download and bun. The dumb thing is I keep trying........ I have several burns of each disk and when one package can not be read on one of the disks I put the other in and hope that it is clean on the other disk and so on....horrible waste of time, but eventually it installed. but alas some people involved at RedHat are either stupid or enjoy give so many of us grief.....its a good thing that ultimately RedHat is the best distro once you get it going.

May I ask a potentially rude question? Have you tried burning the discs at a fairly slow speed? I've never had a problem with ISO files who's MD5s have checked out OK. I have had a problem with discs that have been burned at a high speed; I have had problems with damaged discs; and I have had problems with discs that have been left out. I usually burn my ISOs at 8x.

Ohh, come to think of it - I have had a problem with an ISO, sort of. Disc 2 of Debian/PPC Stable, to be precise. The problem turned out to be that the ISO file was actually an HFS filesystem, not an ISO9660 filesystem, and the Debian installer wouldn't read it. However, once I had discovered this, I still found that the files on the disc were perfectly intact.

No...I tried everything burning slow was one of them. I know a number of people that have had the same problem, but then there are also those like you that haven't had it. What I recently did was pick up a book on Fedora that had a slim version of Fedora Core 1 on a disk and then added what I needed after getting it on...but I stall have about 10 disks that have one error or another. If I ever download again I'll be using CDRW's for sure......

You know, if you have a Linux system already you may be able to install another one without having to burn the ISO files at all.

Many distros provide boot floppies for almost every eventuality - installing over a serial connection, over a parallel connection, etc etc.

Sometimes one of the options is to install from ISO files on your harddrive. I am unsure whether Fedora has this capability, but it might be worth a look.

Basically what you would need to do is mount the ISO file (the first one) and find the bootfloppies section. Check if there's any docs about what functionality each floppy image provides - if there's a harddrive.img (or similar) then it may well provide the functionality I am talking about.

If you have found the installation bootfloppies, you have found the image that allows you to install from ISO files on the harddrive, and you have some spare floppies lying around, then you can make the bootfloppy and have a go!